The Gossip Machine

Before social media, newspapers or even writing, humans had a way of working out who to trust. We talked about each other.

In this episode, Mary-Ann Ochota explores gossip as one of humanity’s oldest social technologies. Cognitive neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott explains why gossip may have evolved as an efficient human equivalent of primate grooming. It helps us build bonds, share information and work out who belongs in our social world.

Historian and writer Tom Standage traces how those conversations travelled further as new technologies arrived. From Roman letters and early newspapers to the printing press and the internet, every new medium has expanded our circle of gossip. It has made it easier to share knowledge, but also easier for rumours, propaganda and misinformation to travel far beyond the people who can verify them.

Then mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil asks what happens when the gossip machine is run by algorithms. Her work reveals how the systems making decisions about jobs, education, credit and more can carry old prejudices into the future. Algorithms can be enormously useful, but if we are going to trust them, we need to understand whose interests they serve and what they are really deciding.

It is a story about the human need to share information and make sense of one another. The tools have changed, but the instinct remains the same.

Trust Forward is a podcast from Sumsub, AI-powered trust infrastructure for compliance operations at scale, made in collaboration with This is Distorted. Every story here is really a version of the same problem playing out in a different era. Today it plays out online, in the moment a business has to decide whether to trust a stranger on the other side of a screen. That’s the problem Sumsub exists to solve.

Sumsub's Website: sumsub.com

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Sumsub's YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@sumsubcom

Mary-Ann Ochota on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mary-ann-ochota-frgs-9234aa61/

Tom Standage: https://mediadirectory.economist.com/people/tom-standage/

Cathy O’Neil: https://cathyoneil.org/

Professor Sophie Scott on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sophie-scott-179b6610/

Resources for this episode can be found here: https://trustforward.sumsub.com/episodes/the-gossip-machine

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